


journey to sleep

by xkailajayx



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Nile finds Booker before Quynh, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:21:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25399822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xkailajayx/pseuds/xkailajayx
Summary: nile can't sleep, and it's been getting worse, and she just can't- she just can't. not anymore.so she turns to booker for help.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman
Comments: 48
Kudos: 342





	1. Chapter 1

It wasn’t hard to find Booker. Not really, not when he’d almost given up entirely. He had a hundred years to wait, without hope of seeing Andy; whatever faith he had was long gone. And so it didn’t take Copley a day to find him, when Nile asked.

She knew how bad it was. She knew how deeply the betrayal had hurt Joe, and Nicky, and that Andy’s feelings were the most nebulous of them all. She  _ knew _ that he could have killed Andy with his betrayal, and more than anything she knew the pain, the sheer physical pain, that he had inevitably subjected them all to. 

But she couldn’t help it. Andy had had her life, her lives, so many of them and so much of it. She’d had, as far as Nile could tell, millenia with people who understood her- with Quynh, who haunted the two women in very different ways. Nicky and Joe had each other and for them, this was nothing but a blessing. Millenia with the man who holds your heart, how could this be something cruel? It didn’t happen often that Nile found herself longing for the firm hold of her mother, warm and safe and home, but she woke with such a pit in her stomach one night that she cried until dawn. Her brtother’s birthday came and passed and she wondered what life would turn him into as he grew. She wondered if asking Copley to send her updates would make it better or worse.

It was after a week of no sleep between her mother’s eyes and Quynh’s screaming, drowning rage that she finally used the address Copley had given her, the address in the dirty, busy city that Booker had barely left since they left him.

“You aren’t meant to be here, and you know it.” He called to her from his seat in the dingy living room of the flat he was renting. “I have another ninety-nine years on my  _ sentence _ .” He scoffed and shook his head, waving vaguely at the room. “Well, you’re here. Take a seat. Want a drink?”

It took Nile’s eyes a moment to acclimatise from the bright outside to the dark room and when she did, she wasn’t shocked. Disappointed, and tired, but not surprised. Bottles, empty, half empty, lay across the room. Stale cigarette smoke clung to the walls and as she looked closer, she saw the ashtray on the table was overflowing, spreading across the stained, propped-up coffee table. 

“What the hell are you doing, Booker?” She said, shaking her head as she scanned over the chaos. “Is all you do sit here and drink?” Reaching to switch the light on, she found it didn’t come on no matter how forcefully she pressed it. 

“The light broke about… three months ago? I forget. Leave me to my grief like the others did, wait a century, and you’ll meet a different man.” He muttered, rolling his eyes and pushing to rise; knocking a clatter of bottles together. “I do not need your pity.”

“Well good thing you don’t have it!” Nile almost snarled, storming through the small home until she found a glass. None were clean, but they weren’t exactly for the purpose of  _ drinking _ . Filling it with water, she turned back to an incredulous Booker. “You go get in the shower, or I get you clean myself.”

“What?” He spluttered, eyes wide as she stared at him menacingly, holding the glass out as a threat. Andy had been rubbing off on her, her stubborn streak if anything encouraged.

“Shower, or  _ shower. _ ” Nile said again, taking a step closer to him. “Your choice.”

Sighing, he turned and walked towards the bathroom door, shaking his head as he went. “It won’t help the smell. I have no clean clothes.” 

Nile just hung her head for a moment, before taking a deep breath and looking around. She had a lot of work to do if she was going to be done before he was finished. 

___ 

With the bottles and the trash swept away into bags and the curtains and windows open, the flat already had more character. The faded wallpaper was a pretty pattern, Nile wasn’t sure what, but it looked better in the light. She’d put whatever clothes she’d found in the small, battered looking washer/dryer and hoped the cycle would be fast when she pressed the buttons, the guide worn away.

When he did eventually emerge, dirty clothes in one hand and the other holding a too-small towel around himself. “You have been very busy.” 

“I have. You have… a little while before you have any clean clothes.” She eyed the machine, shaking so hard she was worried it might start making its way out of the small kitchen. 

“Oh, well, should I put these back on then?” he asked, eyebrow raised. 

Nile sighed and shook her head. “No, you sit down and wait. And  _ behave _ . Don’t you go open another bottle, you hear me?”

He sat and chuckled to himself, watching her stalk around and neaten up the last few things. “So. Why did you actually come here? I know it wasn’t to clean me up, so come on.”

She found a seat at last, a dated couch with holes where the cover had worn through to padding, and stared at Booker for a long moment. “They don’t get it.” She said, simply and with a shrug. “They don’t understand like you because… because even Andy got to give that part of her life an ending. Your ending… my ending… they’re not like hers, not like Nicky and Joe’s.”

He nodded slowly, watching her carefully. They’d had fragments of this, slivers of understanding and knowing so keenly that this is not something that can be shared, is something that can barely be understood, but it had still been so fresh and new to her then. The reality of it all, the way it would  _ feel _ when you realise you cannot describe the way your mother smelled, or recall the name of your sister’s pet. The way loneliness clung to her back even when Joe and Nicky and Andy were all focused on her, on finding a way for this to be  _ normal _ for her. 

Only Booker understood that. 

“I don’t know what I can do to help you, Nile.” He said, almost hopelessly. Looking around he shrugged. “This isn’t the first time I have spent like this, lost in anger and emptiness. They never understood it, so I hid it, the best I could.”

They sat in silence for a long time, knowing there weren’t words to help with their pain, and no amount of healing would take it away. Time would not mend those wounds, left open and bleeding for centuries. 

The washer dinged, and they both almost leapt to their feet. Nile busied herself with getting him clothes and chasing him into the bathroom- she knew how comfortable the others were around each other, but she wasn’t quite prepared for the full show.

“Did you ever tell them how much Quynh-” She started, trying to find the words for the agonising feeling she had whenever she dreamed of her, the loneliness and the fear and the anger and the cycles of blame, the cycles of waking up wanting her hands around Andy’s throat and the days she couldn’t get the thought of burning every church she saw to the ground out of her head. 

“Did I ever tell them that I see her almost every night?” He finished, calling through the bathroom door as he finished dressing. “Did I ever tell them that there was a voice in my head that I think might be hers, wanting revenge and violence and and end to it all?” Booker shook his head. 

“How do you  _ live _ with it? If I’m not dreaming of her, I’m dreaming of… of the man who killed me, or my mom, and I just. I just want to sleep. Just one night, where I don’t…” She fell heavily into the chair again, hiding her face in her hands. “I want to be strong. I want to show Andy I’m worth her… her legacy. But how am I supposed to do that when I can’t sleep?”

Slipping onto the couch next to her, he curled an arm around her shoulder. He knew how it felt, the sleepless nights, the endless water above crushing, pushing down and down and down- he knew the taste of bile in his throat when he felt her die agonizingly slowly, fighting with every last second. 

“I drink. I drink and I hurt my friends.” He said, without a hint of irony. “I drink enough that my hands stop shaking, but not so much they start again,” he shrugged, “and then I drink a little more so even if I’m not sleeping, at least I’m not awake.” 

“I can’t live like this, Booker.” Her voice was soft and quiet, not uncertain, but scared. “I look at them and Andy’s getting used to being mortal, and Nicky and Joe are having another  _ honeymoon _ , and they think we’re going to be okay.”

“Then we find her.” He said softly.

“What?” Nile sounded incredulous, and she pulled away from him to stare at him hard. “Andy looked-”

“Andy looked before, before there were a lot of things. We know more than we did then.” He said, pushing up from the sofa and going to his bag, pulling out a sheaf of papers. “I still have most of her research, from back then. She hadn’t given up, even by the time I came along.”

“What do- you’re serious?” She asked, staring at the archaic star charts and maps of countries she’d never heard of. “You think we can just go out and find her.” 

“I do. Are you going to help me?” Booker asked, already moving to pack the rest of his clothes, glancing at the last full bottle left for a long time before shaking his head and moving to the door. “This is our signal, Nile. Come with me.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> booker and nile go travelling together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took *forever* to come out of me, sorry guys! ty for the comments and kudos, come talk to me @wordsofwarning on tumblr!

The journey was long, just to get to where they knew the boat set off from. They spent long days moving through back streets and country roads, taking the scenic route in order to avoid being seen. It meant a journey that should have taken a matter of days, across the channel and through England, turned into one that took weeks. They didn’t speak often, not at first, not until Nile started asking the questions.

Booker had been expecting the same questions he’d asked- about aging and illness and injuries, about war stories and what being  _ immortal _ really meant. He’d taken much longer than Nile had to realise what it meant, to know you were going to outlive your loved ones and know even more that you couldn’t help them. You couldn’t do a thing. Instead of being bitter, and angry, as Booker had been his whole immortal life, it seemed like Nile was ready to embrace the next adventure as if her life before her first death had been a book she could put back on the shelf. 

He envied her for that. Her bright exuberance and unwillingness to give him an inch, lest he take a mile. He didn’t judge her for that, not at all. He had seen how she had grown into the space Andy and Joe and Nicky had been giving her and he was proud of her, and confident enough to think they could do this together. They could find her, because as connected as Andy was to her- they had had their destined meeting. Booker, Nile and Quynh still needed theirs.

The nights were somehow easier with Nile there. They’d had so little time before everything had happened, that their  _ unique _ experience of Quynh hadn’t really been discussed. But after months of nightmares, Booker knew Nile couldn’t ignore them.

They woke up together, across the room from each other in abandoned buildings and packed tight into a tiny tent, or taking it in turns to sleep on the back seat of the car. Every time they could feel her presence in their minds, her echoing fury, and they could do nothing to stop it. Breathing heavily in pitch darkness, Booker sitting on his hands to stop them shaking and Nile restlessly pacing, they knew the search wouldn’t be an easy one. But instead of drinking himself to sleep, he would talk to Nile. Quiet and soft, about stories Nicky and Joe had told him, about little things Andy did he knew to remember her lost... her loss.

He told her of the stories where Quynh was a firebrand, twirling through battle with her bow and stepping aside for no one. He told her of the stories of a kind, forgiving woman who remembered what it felt like to starve. He told her so, so many stories of a woman he had never met that he wondered whether all this time he had been trying to live up to her for Andy’s sake, whether he had tried to fill the gaping hole her absence had left. 

He’d never managed to, not in his eyes, and not in Andy’s. His betrayal showed how much of a pale imitation he was, a bandaid for a mortal wound that had been killing Andy longer than even he had been alive. But if he could just bring her back- if he could just make that right, give them each other back then maybe… maybe it would have all been worth it. 

Each night, they grew closer together. The winter was drawing in and even with the packs Nile had built for them along the way it was cold. They started finding smaller rooms, closer spaces that were easier to keep warm, and woke up almost nose to nose some nights when the nightmares struck.

They stopped talking about her after a while. When Nile woke up ready to tear down walls and Booker curled into a ball and wept until dawn they reached out for each other, linking their fingers until they fell back to sleep.

It was getting harder when they had to stop at petrol stations, or the corner shop of some small village, for Booker to ignore the row of bottles sat in every one.  _ Addiction _ was a word Booker was hesitant to use, but he had seen people lost in the woods with their poison of choice and he had looked at them the same way Nile was looking at him. 

When his hands shook from the thought of another night with Quynh’s waterlogged screams, though, she looked away. She didn’t ask, she didn’t question his ability or make it a big deal; she just held his hand a little tighter. 

The part of their journey that had to be on land- at least, if they wanted to make it there within a year, and without ending up at the bottom of the ocean themselves- came to an end after what felt like an age, though Nile had only found him a few short weeks before. The long days of walking through the countryside had taken their toll, especially as the days grew shorter and shorter.

They arrived at the beachfront in the evening and stood on an old concrete pier to watch as the grey skies turned the water stormy and Booker felt a creeping fear he never had before. He had been here, or a beach nearby, so similar to it, not long after Andy and the others had found him. They had searched for clues, one more chance with Booker’s dreams. But it had come to nothing in the end, and he stopped telling the others about his dreams. He wondered, sometimes, if they remembered that he had them. If they had any idea of it, and whether they would understand more if they ever did. 

As it stood, Nile knew more about his experience of immortality than even Andy did. Even her nightmares of Quynh weren’t the destiny-linked barrages of an eternally drowning woman; they were the broken echoes of a life together.

“What now?” Nile asked him, as they sat on the pier and looked out to sea. “We can’t exactly swim for it.” 

“Copley has a boat for us,” he shrugged and leaned back. “Next town over, might take an hour in the morning. But this was where the boat set off from, all that time ago.” He gestured over at the ruin of the church on the hill a ways away from them, barely visible as nature reclaimed it. 

"This was where they tortured Andy?" Nile looked around at the theoretically picturesque surroundings, lush green hills and a sea that went on forever, though it was dark and foreboding in the low light from the hour and the poor weather. 

“Her and Quynh, until Nicky and Joe found her.” Booker stared out to sea and frowned a little. “None of them talk much, about back then. A few Quynh stories, when Andy’s drunk and happy and can forget where she is for a minute.” 

“We’re going to get her back,” Nile said, reaching to touch Booker’s shoulder gently. “Then she’ll be back with Andy, and we can… sleep.” 

Booker chuckled, shaking his head a little as he looked at her hand, settled on his jacket. “Yes. And then we will sleep.” She seemed mollified by this and pulled back, crossing her legs and looking around. Booker knew that sleep still wouldn’t come so easy for him after the dreams of drowning stopped, but it would come more easily. And that wasn’t something to sniff at.

“We should find somewhere to stay for the night.” Nile said, frowning at the steadily blackening sky. “I don’t think Old Faithful will stay waterproof much longer.”

The small, cheap pop up tent they’d found in a petrol station hadn’t fared well, especially not with two full grown adults in it. The wires keeping its shape were bent, and there was already a sizable rip from where one of Booker’s knives had been pressed against the fabric all night. 

“There was a little beach hut, further up. Doesn’t look like much, but it’ll keep the worst off.” He shrugged again and pushed to stand, swinging his bag over his shoulder and offering a hand to help Nile up. “We should get sorted now. Early morning tomorrow.”

She took his hand and hauled herself up, waiting for him to clamber over the low wall before she dropped down on the other side and started walking in the direction he’d gestured, her own bag dangling from her hand.

They hadn’t spoken about their families again, and as they carefully broke into the small beach hut, built higher than the tide, they squeezed past old, derelict canoes and ripped deck chairs to find a corner they could lie down and pretend to sleep. It was far from perfect, musty smelling and dank, but it would keep them from the worst of the weather. 

Weather that hit not long after they had settled, howling wind and tearing rain that sounded like the small hut was being attacked. Too loud to easily hear the other, so talking was out, the two of them sat next to each other in not-quite-silence, reading borrowed books until the dawn. Between the noise and the nightmares, there was no point in trying to close their eyes.


	3. chapter three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Booker and Nile get a little closer to finding Quynh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They wouldn't stop being sad, I'm sorry.
> 
> Thanks to birds for the beta!

It wasn't so much  _ sleep _ , in the hour before dawn as the storm faded, that the two of them found. Startling awake together at the now familiar, but always harrowing screams they stared at each other in something akin to amazement.

"Did you see-"

"There were rocks-" 

Nile dragged out a sketchbook, one Booker hadn’t seen her use but had  _ seen _ , identical to the kind Joe had been buying for the last thirty years. He frowned, tilting his head to the side as she started sketching.

“You can draw?” he asked, leaning closer to see the marks she made on the paper. 

“I can. You think most twenty-six year olds recognise a Rodin on sight, Booker?” she replied, detailing the rock formation that they had both, suddenly, seen in their dreams. 

“I… Don’t know what most twenty-six year olds would recognise, if I’m being honest.” Booker shrugged and pointed at one of the rocks she had drawn. “That was a little bigger, I think. But the shape is… It’s recognisable.”

Nile nodded, adding last bits of shading to the hopefully recognisable formation as she held it out a little so Booker would have a better look.

“Why are we having… different dreams? Didn’t you come here, before?” she asked him, frown deepening as she wondered what it could mean, what the flashes of the sharp rocks reaching out of the water meant.

“I only dreamt of her, the same dream for the last two hundred years,” he almost shrugged. “Even when we came here- though Andy was so certain she’d searched every inch of ocean they could have taken her to, this side of England.” Pulling out the maps and charts and spreading them on the dusty floor and over their bags, he pointed. “It’s not a large enough formation to be marked on a map, and we didn’t sail out too far, not that I remember, but this area has… more problems, more obstacles for ships to get by.” 

“She would have moved.” Nile said quietly, looking at the maps. “Depending on where she was… where the ship was, there are tectonic plates and ocean currents- I don’t know much, my brother was the one who liked science, but… Maybe she moved until she hit this formation? Got caught on it?” she pondered, smoothing her fingers over the map of the area Booker had pointed to. 

He nodded, brow furrowing as he thought. “That sounds plausible, but I’m just as much in the dark as to why we’re dreaming of it, now. From what the others have told me, distance doesn’t change the intensity of the dreams, or what they show.”

“But  _ time _ would change things, wouldn’t it? And she’s dreaming of us both, now. She has been for months- maybe she’s…” Nile shrugged at him, pushing to stand and move around the cramped seaside shack. “Maybe she’s realised we’re looking for her again?” 

“We should get to the next town.” Booker stated, packing their things away again. “We have the picture, to show the crew of the ship Copley found us. I’m not sure what he thinks they’ll do when we bring her out in an iron coffin still alive, but that’s his job to deal with.” 

Nile snorted something akin to a laugh, shaking her head. Copley had called it an  _ honour _ to work for the group and between the four of them Copley had his work cut out for him. That had been before Booker came out of his stupor and he and Nile had demanded a boat and a crew, one Copley would make almost invisible to anyone who didn’t see them with their own two eyes. It was just more of the same nonsense that even Andy had been adding to, no matter the others trying to remind her of her newly-mortal status. 

\--- 

Getting to the town wasn’t difficult, and neither was finding the contact that Copley had arranged for them at the small dockyard there. They travelled in silence, for the most part, each of them thinking about the dreams, the changes and seeing the rocks, and exactly what it all meant. 

Was Quynh somehow reaching out to them? Had the ocean somehow pulled and pushed her until she could see the sky again? Booker was raw inside from the sense that perhaps, if only he’d not kept the nightmares secret from the others for the last century, they might have found her sooner.

If Nile had known the thoughts running through his mind, she might have slapped him. From everything she’d been told, everything she’d seen, he wasn’t an evil man- and, while she hadn’t seen much in the short time they’d been together, she had thousands of stories the others told. At least when it wasn’t too painful to think about what Booker had done to them, they weren’t stingy with the details.

But he knew he wasn’t good at making decisions. It was part of why he liked going along with Andy’s plans, with the others, because they didn’t second guess themselves. Not ever, in his eyes. Everything Booker did, he second guessed. It had been months, since Copley had reached out, before he reached back. It had been years of learning how to stop screaming when he woke up before the others forgot he dreamed of Quynh. He’d dithered so much on telling his own  _ sons  _ he couldn’t die that they were dying themselves before he could. 

The only thing he was good at deciding to do was run away. He knew, in his bones, the moment he was given the offer of a life in prison or a death in the army that the army would be the easier one to escape. When the others passed their judgement on him, to go and be alone for a century, he didn’t fight it. The only time he didn’t follow his instincts and run for the hills he had his own son pull his heart from his chest. 

He watched Nile as they walked, wondering if his advice- to walk away, run away, from her family- had been the right advice for her. She never ran away from anything, not even when she was terrified. Booker knew she was brilliant, had seen her in combat, and from her reaction to him in the lab, before anything had been revealed by the others, he knew she’d figured out his betrayal quicker than any of the others. He wasn’t sure how, and he wasn’t going to ask, but however she’d done it was impressive. 

Nile was quietly watching him through the whole walk. He’d been right, and it hadn’t taken long for them to get there, but the size of the place… when Booker had said it was a small town, now, she’d been expecting more than the sparse scattering of low cottages. The single path, through what she could now see was more like a village than a town, led to a small dock. 

One that was completely overshadowed by what appeared to be a small luxury yacht. 

Nile decided she wasn’t going to feel so bad when she needed to ask Copley for anything ever again.

There were people scurrying over the deck of the boat, and Nile exchanged a look with Booker. They both knew this would be hard to hide, hard to explain. And then a younger woman walked over to them.

“Booker, Nile?” She asked, accent possibly Eastern European- Nile had travelled a lot more than she was used to in the last year, but she wasn’t perfect at picking out where someone was from like the others. Not yet, anyway. “We are just setting up. James told us you would want privacy, so it is only the two of you. He said you know how to dive?” 

Nile and Booker exchanged another look, and her eyes widened. He nodded and shrugged one shoulder. “You pick things up, here and there.” Nile was incredulous, but then, she had spent far too much of the last twelve months staring in confused horror at the others. That Booker knew how to dive was quite low on the list, really. 

They eventually moved onto the boat and had a quick rundown of everything. Booker seemed mostly disinterested, except when they were discussing the safety harness, and the winch that they would use to haul up… whatever it was they were looking for. Copley had managed to organise all of this, somehow, without a single one of them having any idea why.

None of them recognised the picture Nile had drawn, but they all agreed that Booker’s assumption was correct. If it was in this area, it was more likely than not to be there.

Once everything was in place, they started the boat and moved it out into the sea. Nile wasn’t used to this, the opulence of the ship, even with its practical additions of a high powered winch and diving rig. Even sitting in the cabin with Booker, looking at everything that had been moulded and designed to look as expensive as possible even if that meant it looked worse, she shook her head. 

“Something on your mind?” Booker asked, watching her carefully. 

She shrugged after a long moment and turned to look at him. “I was just thinking of my mom. She always said that art, beauty, it only mattered when it was real,” she frowned a little, trying to explain. “This,” Nile gestured at the uncomfortable benches, the tacky golden chandelier, “this is just someone trying to show off exactly how much money they have, without considering… anything else.”

He hummed and nodded for a moment, looking out to sea as they made towards their heading. “There have always been people like that.” Booker snorted a small noise. “Didn’t you see Merrick’s penthouse? It felt just as sterilised as the lab.”

“Neither of them were very sterilised when we were finished,” Nile pointed out with a small grin, before she also turned her gaze to the sea. “It was never like that, at home. There was always a mess, somewhere, always clutter. Mom always said she hated it, but it made everything feel lived in.”

Booker watched as her face crumpled for a moment and she pushed to stand and walked towards the door to the deck. He could tell she was crying, and he almost followed behind to comfort her. But he had been the one to tell her not to return to them, and he had been the one to tell her what her family would think of her if they ever found out. She didn’t need his comfort. 

She didn’t know what she needed. She wanted her mom, her brother, the comforting warmth of a hug or the spark of his laugh. She wanted to find Quynh so she could  _ rest _ . She wanted… she didn’t even really know what she wanted, past the next day. Nile knew that she couldn’t stay that way, stay focused on her grief and her nightmares, because that’s what Booker had done and… look at him now. 

But she could cry. She could mourn them. It had only been a year and she was allowed to mourn them still, dammit. She was allowed to carry the weight of them for a little while longer, and no one could take that away from her. 

\---

It would take them the best part of a day to get to the area they thought might contain the casket, and it was clear that the people this had been originally made for didn’t really care about the sailing of it all.

Nile hadn’t even known autopilot really existed on boats; as a Marine in Afghanistan she always found it ironic that she spent so little time anywhere near water, so when Booker emerged from the helm she was a little apprehensive.

“So long as nothing goes wrong with the computer, we should come to a stop near the area we need to search in a few hours.” Booker called over to her, able to read her expressive face easily. She’d stopped crying a while ago, instead sitting and sketching the lines of the bow. 

“Is anything likely to go wrong with the computer?” she asked, leaning back a little to look at him. 

“No, I don’t think so,” Booker shrugged a little. “It’s a fancy one, to go with the rest of the boat.” He moved to sit near her, not too close, and smiled softly at the drawing she had started. “You’re good. I didn’t say that, earlier.” 

“Thank you,” she smiled a little and looked up at him, tilting her head to the side. “Joe said you used to draw sometimes, too.”

He sighed softly, nodding. “Yes, I did. I was a forger- I still am, but more for travel papers than anything else, any longer. I learned to like… making things. The little details that make it look true. Joe pushed me into trying more… conventional art. It was nice, for a while.”

“For a while? Why did you stop?” she asked, leaning forwards again. 

“ Jean-Pierre.” Booker shrugged. “I didn’t want to create anything we didn’t…  _ need _ , after he passed.”

“Oh.” Nile frowned, sad, and sorry she’d brought it up, but Booker’s hand on her arm stopped her from curling into herself. 

“I don’t mind you asking questions, Nile. This is still new for you, and Nicky, Joe, Andy… they didn’t have the same experience we did. That you’re still having.” Booker shrugged one shoulder and watched Nile with soft eyes.

“I don’t know what to ask,” she shrugged back at him, closing the sketchbook and putting it back in her bag along with her pencil. “I don’t know what I should be asking, what I actually want to know and what… what I’d rather not.”

“I thought you weren’t letting it affect you at all when we first started travelling together,” Booker said softly, after a long moment with only the waves to listen to. “That you had parcelled it all away, ready to move forwards.” 

Nile wasn’t shocked by that. She’d gotten good at hiding how she felt a lot of the time, around Joe and Nicky and Andy, knowing nothing the three of them could do would really make it better. They didn’t understand in the same way Booker did; especially not the nightmares. “I’ve spent a year learning to hide it.” She replied eventually. “Nicky and Joe are… they’re so wrapped up in each other and it’s beautiful, it really is, but it’s not…”

“Not something you can watch for a long time when you know it’s something you may never have?” Booker supplied. “Could never have, given their… history.”

She nodded, and looked away from him and to the grey, though relatively calm, ocean. “And Andy’s dealing with something new now, along with missing Quynh. I’d feel… It wouldn’t feel right, to throw my problems into all that.”

“But I understand it, and you know that,” he said with a simple nod. “I’m sorry, for presuming. I hid from them too.”

“You know, when you say things like that, it makes me realise maybe I should be talking to them about it.” Nile raised her eyebrows. She didn’t reference his betrayal often, if ever- he  _ had _ apologised to her, and she had forgiven him. But sometimes… 

“You’re right.” He said simply. “I should have talked to them, I should have told them what was going on. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have-” 

“Made some shitty decisions.” Nile interrupted, before he could wallow any longer. “You made mistakes, you hurt your friends, and now you’re doing something to help with their healing.” 

Her gaze held him in place, like he was a naughty child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and he nodded slightly. “I’m going to… see if I can sleep a while. While we’re waiting to get there.” 

Nile almost chuckled at the suggestion they could properly sleep, but nodded back. “I’ll… I’ll come too. Better if we’re rested.” 

It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, as the cabin below deck was so well furnished it hardly looked like the inside of a boat. The large bed took up almost a third of the cabin- more space than they’d had on the floor of the shack the night before. Shrugging, Booker dropped his bags to one side and lay down with a grunt.    
  
“It’s soft.” He grumbled, as he got comfortable. 

Nile shook her head a little and settled on the other side, sinking into the comfortable pillows. “That’s the point, Booker. Rich people get nice things. Not everyone enjoys sleeping on the floor of a cave.” 

“I don’t think anyone  _ enjoys _ it. Except maybe Andy, but then again, she has spent more of her life sleeping in caves than anyone else in the world,” he observed, shrugging as he moved pillows around. “I just prefer to feel like I’m sleeping on a solid surface and not a cloud.”

Nile sniggered and wriggled back into the bed happily. “Well, I for one am extremely happy with this turn of events. Go to sleep, Booker. We’ll find her soon.” 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> out on the ocean, booker and nile dive down for quynh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So i got a cat and booker is extremely sweet and very demanding of cuddles so i’m writing this with him basically sitting on my hands. Check out @wordsofwarning on tumblr if you would like to see pics of the boy!

_ Water. Everywhere. Water is everything- water  _ **_has been_ ** _ everything for so long, so long except for- except for their faces, his face and her face and- and their  _ **_lives_ ** _ outside of the water and their lives outside of the coffin and their lives with  _ **_her_ ** _. _

Nile and Booker gasped awake, clinging on each other as they recovered from the flashes of anger and fear and death. During their nap, the longest sleep they’d likely gotten in weeks, they had moved across the bed until they were nose to nose.in the centre. Swallowing, Nile’s eyes were wild as she tried to make sense of the intensity of it. Even the first dream she’d had of all of them hadn’t been like this, so direct and so- so- so  _ close _ . 

Booker seemed much the same. He had spent the last two hundred years with those dreams and the only other time in his life he had felt the pressure in his chest, of so much  _ terror, _ was the first time he died. There was nothing like it, no comparisons he could make would match it and he knew Nile felt the same from her panicked gaze.

Taking her hand carefully, he shifted onto his back and twined their fingers together. “I think we’re close,” he murmured, and as they lay and caught their breath, the gentle movement of the ship lessened. The engines shut off after a short moment, and Booker looked over at Nile with eyebrows raised. “As unpleasant as that was, I think it’s quite a good indicator.”

She nodded, and pushed to sit. She didn’t pull her hand back, squeezing his gently as she frowned. “We slept that whole time?” she murmured as she took a deep breath. The light coming through the cabin’s windows was still fairly bright, though Nile knew it was supposed to take hours. It would be dusk soon. 

“Maybe we needed it,” he shrugged back, tilting a look up at her. “We’re about to start diving, and I wouldn’t want to do that sleep deprived.”

“That’s… true.” Nile shook her head and finally pulled her hand away, awkwardly crawling across the bed to get to her boots. “It… I slept well. I haven’t since… well. I haven’t since I left for Afghanistan.”

Pushing himself off the bed to find his bag, Booker huffed a humourless chuckle. “Warzones don’t make for the best of lullabies, do they?” 

“They don’t, no,” she said firmly, before tugging her boots on and standing to stretch. “If we’re here, we should figure out exactly what we’re going to do. And if we can see those rocks.” She gestured with the sketchbook she’d scribbled the shape of them in as she moved to the door of the cabin, shoulders squared in determination. 

It was astonishing, how everything had changed while they’d been sleeping. Nile could no longer see land, but she could see the strange rocks scattered around. It only took a few moments for her to recognise the specific formation- their guess had been right, on the area, and they’d been fortunate enough in choosing their initial spot that it didn’t take long for her to direct the ship the last part of the way.

Booker got ready to dive. It made sense that he’d go down, and Nile would operate the machinery- they had already discussed a code of tugs on the rope, and at least they didn’t have to worry about the bends- only Booker ending up lost at sea if anything happened to the tether. He trusted Copley enough to believe it would, though not enough to forego checking everything before he launched himself into the sea. 

It didn’t take long to, and once they had both his line and the winch for the coffin- hopefully necessary- set up, Booker was ready to go. 

It wasn’t an easy thing, to dive into the water he’d been drowning in every night since his first death. But he did it, because he had to. Because he owed them this comfort, this closure. This new beginning. He owed it to Andy, to return her heart to her after he stabbed her in the back. 

The water was cold, but the suit Booker had on kept out the worst of it. The darkness came on quick, and the torch he had attached to his mask only cut swathes through the black. It was still there, creeping into the edges of his vision. There were a few, terrifying moments when he was sure, so sure, that the line was going to break and he was going to drift- brought on by the sheer, two-hundred-year-long terror of water that had grown out of his dreams. 

He had to come back up, a few times. They needed to adjust their angle or change their spot, or switch out his oxygen tanks. It was difficult, and tiring, and Booker hated every second of it with every fibre of his being. But he kept going down.

Nile watched quietly. It was difficult to do much else- absent minded half-sketches started filling the pages of her book and with each return she got a little more nervous. It wasn’t only that she feared they wouldn’t find Quynh, but that they might lose Booker at the same time. It wasn’t an easy thing, doing this. She knew she didn’t want to and she’d been having the dreams for a year now. She’d have done it, if Booker couldn’t, and she was still willing to if he needed to stop. But the cold, dark water was a living grave for them all, and none of the others had the visceral reminder in quite the same way that they did.

She was ready to tell him to finish for the night when the tugs on the anchor came. One, two- that would have meant emergency recovery- three, that would have meant let me keep going, and four- that one meant they had her. 

Waiting until the four pulls came on the winch line- which it did, right after- Nile grinned so bright. They’d found it. That was the only thing it could possibly mean- that they’d found  _ her _ . Turning the winch on, she felt the strain start. Booker would come up with it, slowly- he knew dying and recovering from the Bends was decidedly less than pleasant, even if he could do it, and they didn’t want to put Quynh through that. Not with… everything else. 

She was sat there for what felt like  _ hours _ , waiting for them to come up. It wasn’t, not quite, they didn’t have the air for that. Didn’t want to drag Quynh through that. She could barely breathe while she waited, keeping an eye on the winch and moving it and the anchor cable at regular intervals until eventually, the top of Booker’s covered head appeared over the faint waves.

Clambering out, he pulled his hood and mask off and breathed out a ragged breath. He was pale, shaking a little. She knew part of it was from the adrenaline, the sheer thrill of having found her- and no small part of it was from his deep, abiding fear of the water. 

They made quick work of pulling the iron casket over the side of the boat and onto the deck, the rust and degradation of the metal making it lighter than Nile had expected. 

She also wasn’t expecting the screaming. Well- it was hard to categorise the noises coming from the coffin as  _ screams _ , exactly. The saltwater had been rough on Quynh’s throat, and she had been screaming for hundreds of years without being heard. They made quick work of the fastenings on the coffin, held together it seemed more by the sealife that had grown around it that the metal itself. 

Neither of them really knew what to expect when she first came out of the box. The sun was just rising, and as the sun hit her pale, ill-looking face- she had been away from the sun for a  _ long _ time, she took in a breath so deep Nile knew it was her first knowing one on land. 

“Hey, Quynh, we-” Nile’s calm words were cut off as Quynh flung herself out of the remains of the coffin, awkwardly moving away from them as fast as she could. Her eyes were wild- confused- and Nile put a hand out on Booker’s arm as he moved towards her. 

“She’s scared. We have to let her come to us,” she said softly, frown deep and voice low.

Booker scoffed and shook his head. “She’s a person, not a kitten.” 

“She’s a person who’s spent hundreds of years not getting to be a person, she’s- we need to give her space.” She stated, settling back to sit down and carefully watch the other woman.

“We have clothes for her?” Booker frowned a little, looking towards the cabin- in between them. Nile nodded. They were one of the things Booker himself had picked up, though they’d spent a little time arguing over what would be the easiest for her to wear. Everything was going to be different, now, and they didn’t know how much of the world Quynh had seen through their eyes. 

She wasn’t screaming, now, in either her waterlogged voice or the one she was starting to find again. She crouched at the far edge of the deck, staring at them both. 

Whatever was coming next was going to take a long time. 

As Booker turned the boat in the direction of shore again, Nile got things together. Laying out in a pile, and carefully, slowly, placing it in front of Quynh, she waited for her to interact with… anything.

The water bottle, she hoped, wouldn’t cause Quynh any stress- but salt water wasn’t exactly potable. Some food- small rations, so she wouldn’t hurt herself- and clothes, simple enough to pull on if Quynh felt like it.

They had the journey back- another several hours- and Nile spent them quietly watching Quynh as she tentatively approached the pile, investigating each part. She knew most of it would look very different to her, from what she was used to- but throwing pieces of a history that didn’t exist anymore at her would probably have been a bad idea.

It was possible, as she watched, and waited, that they were out of their depth. She hoped they learned to swim quickly.


End file.
